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Autumn Soup

A hearty soup made with cabbage, cucumbers, peas, sorrel or lemon juice, cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Autumn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, bring 1 gallon of water to a boil.

  2. Add 2 pounds of chopped cabbage, 4 chopped cabbage lettuces, a handful of sorrel or juice of ½ lemon, and 2 finely sliced cucumbers.

  3. Stir over a brisk fire until very little liquid remains.

  4. Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour mixed with a little soup stock.

  5. Pour in 3 quarts of soup stock and add 1 quart of young fresh peas.

  6. Boil for 30 minutes and season with 1 teaspoon of salt and 2 teaspoons of sugar.

Finish

  1. For a puree, pass the soup through a coarse or fine sieve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Cabbage + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a fuller body.
Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the soup and contributes its own vegetal body and flavour.
Peas
Add sweetness and a soft, starchy body to the soup.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, lettuce, sorrel, cucumber, cream, flour, sugar):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, lettuce, sorrel, cucumber, cream, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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